A COLLEAGUE advised me to take a look at Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan as he thought I might want to recommend the book to students afraid of numbers and statistical concepts. I googled Naked Statistics. I got the following message: “This website is not accessible. The site you are trying to access contains content that is prohibited for viewership within Pakistan.”

I googled Charles Wheelan and accessed the book. Exactly what are censors in Pakistan trying to achieve?

This was not the first time. Many times when friends on Twitter or Facebook mention links to articles or videos related to books, philosophical topics or even general articles on life and living, a similar message pops up that ‘PTA has blocked access to this website’.

Big Brother wants to protect my purity and morality. I wish, even if he was allowed to do so, which is debatable, he’d be smarter, and differentiate between pornography and a book on statistics.

I don’t want to argue with the puritans who insist that sites with pornographic material should not be accessible here. Many of them are hypocrites, but many genuinely believe in their code.

They should not be allowed to impose their morality on others. But we live in a country where many such battles were lost long ago.

The majority of the people seem to think it’s OK. The courts have often supported such actions by the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, actually asking it to intervene, and most politicians spew rhetoric that supports the same position. So, for the moment, these battles have been lost and there’s no point going there. But there are still battles that must be fought.

Do PTA and other agencies have to be crude in the way they select material to limit access to? Should we target words like ‘naked’? Are there more sophisticated ways of doing this? I am sure technology allows for more discerning and discriminating filtering.

Reminds one of the joke about newspaper censorship during Gen Ayub’s time. A news item in an Urdu paper reported that a young man had committed suicide after becoming dilbardaashta (disheartened) due to his living conditions. The army major censoring the news told the editorial staff that the word ‘dilbar’ (beloved) could be printed but the word ‘daashta’ (mistress) was not acceptable. We clearly have not advanced, if not regressed.

YouTube continues to be banned in Pakistan. If a few books are objectionable, do we close down the entire library? It seems so. YouTube has been out of bounds for more than a year now. Have enough souls been saved? Have our morality and values been preserved better? But, again, allowing that moral policing will continue, why have we not been able to develop more discerning filtering mechanisms?

But the censorship here is not just about pornography, even allowing for all the bungling and lack of sophistication in this case. There are many sites that are blocked because of political reasons too. A lot of sites with content on the Balochistan situation are regularly blocked.

It is not clear to me what the law behind such blocking is. If sites are blocked due to the political nature of their content, do agencies get a court order for doing so? If not, why not? Why should this decision be left to the discretion of some unknown agency and not be transparent and open to scrutiny and, even if taken administratively, open to challenge in courts?

Recently some civil society organisations, in collaboration with the Area Study Centre at the Peshawar University, wanted to hold a launch for Malala Yousafzai’s book. The provincial government forbade the launch. The reasons given: the university should not be used for such political activity, the Centre is not the right place for this, and there are security concerns.

However, I do not think there is any ambiguity about why the launch was forbidden. It was not about security issues as security could have been arranged. And clearly the university is the right place for launching books. If debate cannot take place in universities, then where?

Freedom of speech is supposed to be more protected in a university than in almost any other place. And as long as they do not include defamation, hate speech and so on, the university is indeed the right place for such activities.

We have a good idea why the launch was cancelled. The provincial government probably saw the launch of this book as a provocation for the outlawed Pakistani Taliban. And given the pro-dialogue stance that governments have been taking, the KP government panicked and came down hard on the launch.

Eventually they might realise their mistake and let the launch go ahead, even provide security for it. But, in many ways, the damage has been done: we are now in a place where we cannot even launch a book by a 16-year-old in one of our universities.

Wheelan has written two books, Naked Statistics and Naked Economics. Both are worth reading.

But, unless sense has finally prevailed in PTA and it has allowed access, it would be advisable to search for these via the author’s name.

As a society, we need to take up the issue. People concerned with access to information, to the internet, rights of citizens and wanting to stand up against state-imposed censorship should come together to challenge the state more effectively.

The writer is senior adviser, Pakistan, at Open Society Foundations, associate professor of economics, LUMS, and a visiting fellow at IDEAS, Lahore.